Overview

The inspiration for this product is from this Plone how-to: Integrate External Content in Plone .

Productizing this recipe makes it easy to install, and easy to use. Simply install the product (as per any other Plone product, by copying the ExternalContent folder into the Products folder, restarting Plone, then using the QuickInstaller (or "Add Product" page in the Plone Control Panel), and a new content type, ExternalContent is available, to add to any folder on your website.

This is advantageous, because as a content type all the normal features available to other Plone content types apply: security, bookmarking, etc.

Pulling in external content, while maintaining the Plone look-and-feel, has been important to many of our projects, so ExternalContent is a welcome addition. One application we've made of the product, for example, is to front-end a legacy web application server, while migrating users over to Plone.

Design Overview

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Planned Enhancements

For version 0.4, we plan to add the following features:

• preservation of cookies with the external site
• fix the send-to action so the correct relative URL is always sent
• similarly fix the "add to favorites" action

For version 0.5.:

• re-do the traversal path, so relative links within the external page will route back to the plone site, thus preserving the contents within the Plone page, even after a link is clicked (i.e., become a full "proxy" page)

Screenshots

Creating an ExternalContent item:

in use:

Downloads

Versions

Thanks to Michael Schreiber, among others, for fixing some file naming casing issues with the .tgz version.

version	download
0.3	ExternalContent 0.3 (zip)
	ExternalContent 0.3 (tgz)

Also, we're still getting complaints that our version doesn't load under Linux.  This has been patched here: http://cipcnet.insa-lyon.fr/Members/ppollet/public/ExternalContent_0.3.2_PP.tgz
(also read this ReadMe: http://cipcnet.insa-lyon.fr/Members/ppollet/public/externalcontent_0-3-2_pp-readme/).  Merci, Mr. Pollet, for providing this fix.

Now, what are our users of this product still asking for?  Links within a page still remaining within the Plone site, i.e., having ExternalProduct act like a proxy page (mentioned in our 0.5 planned enhancement).  We would like this too, but we have to admit, it's tricky for us; this involves Zope traversal, and in our experiments we just haven't got this right yet.  But as a quick and dirty solution, for single page display of an external page within your Plone site, ExternalProduct at present does the trick for us.